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This myth inverted the truth, as Ida Tarbell’s spy Hiram Brown reported to J. M. Siddall. “Hiram says that John D. talks about Chicago University a good deal, but that he never brags about the money that he has given it, and that he never indicates that it is his private property,” Siddall reported. “He says that John D. talks about the men who teach in the University a great deal, and that he is constantly bragging about their ability and the great things they are doing.”38 In the one area in which Rockefeller did openly intervene—university finances—he was powerless to brake the spendthrift Dr. William Rainey Harper. Each year, Rockefeller reluctantly gave another million dollars to bolster the permanent endowment to keep pace with his free-spending president. Though Rockefeller kept complaining about the chronic deficits, Harper ignored the founder’s warnings, and relations grew very strained between him and Gates. Rockefeller hated being pressured, and Gates always believed that had Harper asked for less, Rockefeller would have willingly given much more. Then, in December 1903, Harper and the trustees were called to New York for a special session in Rockefeller’s private office. In a dreadful miscalculation, Harper made an appeal for more money, despite the previous year’s shortfall. When polled in Harper’s presence, not a single trustee endorsed his position— a humiliating blow. That night, Senior and Junior huddled, and the next day Junior informed the board that his father would not add a penny to the endowment until the budget gap was plugged. Harper was strictly forbidden from enlarging existing departments or adding new ones. If harrowing for Harper, the episode was also distressing for Rockefeller, who had a fatherly feeling toward him.
Harper’s health, meanwhile, was being undermined by his perpetual exertions. In 1903, he kept complaining of fatigue, yet he was congenitally incapable of moderation. As his son said, “He had frequently told the family that he knew he was shortening his life by the way he was doing his work, but explained to the family that he felt the work could be done better by this method.” Three months after his showdown with Rockefeller, Harper underwent an appendectomy. The doctors found evidence of cancer but were unsure of their diagnosis and delayed telling him until February 1905. By then, the malignancy had grown incurable and Harper minced no words with Gates: “It is as clearly a case of execution announced beforehand as it could possibly be.”39
When Rockefeller heard the news, he was distraught. “He cannot bring himself yet even to attempt to express his feelings,” Gates told Harper.40 On February 16, 1905, he wrote Harper a letter whose laconic eloquence says much about the affection he felt for this flawed but deeply inspiring educator:
You are constantly in my thoughts. The feelings which I have always cherished toward you are intensified at this time. I glory in your marvelous courage and strength, and confidently hope for the best. I have the greatest satisfaction and pleasure in our united efforts for the university and I am full of hope for its future. No man could have filled your place. With highest esteem and tenderest affection.41
A few days later, about to undergo surgery, Harper repaid the tribute: “You have stood by me loyally; I can ask nothing more. The enterprise has proven to be larger and greater than we could have anticipated, but here it is—a splendid institution, and I know that you and your family will stand by it to the end.”42
Harper continued to write and teach, even though he was wasting away from cancer. In August 1905, he made a final visit to his patron at Forest Hill. Though Ida Tarbell had just published her acid character portrait of Rockefeller, he seemed philosophic. As Harper said, “He believes that this is all providential, and that he is to be thoroughly vindicated. It is a subject, however, which still occupies a large part of his mind. . . . I have never known him to be more genial or communicative.” 43 The two men spent bittersweet hours repairing the damage done to their friendship in recent years.
In January 1906, lying on his deathbed, William Rainey Harper, who had always had one eye fixed on heaven, the other on earthly prospects, called in two close friends, Ernest D. Burton and Albion W. Small. He had courted Rockefeller and his fortune during a period of extraordinary public outrage against Standard Oil, and now he seemed haunted, restless, his mind darkened by doubt. “I have not followed Jesus Christ as closely as I ought to have done,” he confessed to his friends. “I have come down from the plane on which I ought to have lived. I have justified it to myself at times as necessary because I was carrying so heavy loads. But I see now that it was all wrong.”44 On January 10, 1906, he died at age fifty.
In the following days, Rockefeller’s mind returned to the exuberant period of his and Harper’s early planning for the university. Harper’s death perhaps affected him more than that of any colleague or friend. As he wrote the new university president, Harry Pratt Judson, “I am personally conscious of having met with an irreparable loss in his death. It seems a mysterious providence that he should have been cut off in the prime of his life and the height of his usefulness. I mourn him as though a member of my own family had been taken, and the sense of loss increases as the days go by.” 45 Seldom did Rockefeller strike such a poignant note. For all his criticism of Harper’s improvidence, he recognized his supreme achievement in creating a school equivalent to an Ivy League college in little more than a decade. Soon after Harper’s death, he announced plans to build a campus library in Harper’s memory and provided a $100,000 endowment to support his widow. In a no-less-fitting memorial, he agreed to close the budget deficit for 1906–1907. If Judson lacked Harper’s vision and eloquence, he was a cautious administrator and sound budget planner—exactly the custodial figure the institution needed.
In 1907, Gates and Junior quietly began to lobby Senior to drop the requirement that the university and a majority of the trustees be Baptists. The school’s fund-raising was hampered by its denominational character. Rockefeller was always of two minds on the matter, wanting the institution to remain under Baptist auspices while also arguing that it should be “conducted in a spirit of the widest liberality” with students drawn from every class of society.46 For two years, Rockefeller deliberated before consenting to abolish the university’s denominational link. Yet this bold step was easy compared to the next one contemplated by his advisers. By 1908, Rockefeller had spent $24 million on the university, but the Chicago citizenry had not lifted the burden from his shoulders. One evening in late 1908, Gates held a conference in his Montclair home with Harry Pratt Judson and Starr Murphy. “What would be the greatest service Mr. Rockefeller could now render the University?” Gates asked Judson and then promptly answered his own question: “Dr. Judson, the greatest possible service Mr. Rockefeller could now render to the University would be to separate himself from it altogether, withdraw his representatives, and turn it absolutely over to the public forever.”47 When Judson protested that the university was still incomplete and sorely in need of funds, Gates said that Rockefeller might make one final large gift before departing.
Bent upon this plan, Gates managed to convince Junior who, in turn, tried to win over his father, who was flabbergasted by the suggestion and silently tabled it. When Junior renewed the subject in early 1909, his father rejected it categorically. “I confess the thought rather staggers me. . . . The institution is so large and far reaching in its influence and we have been such a potent factor in its upbuilding that I tremble at the possibility of cutting loose from our relation and leaving it a great craft in the middle of the ocean.”48 Though the campaign started out less than promisingly, Gates and Junior knew that major decisions were often protracted with Rockefeller. In November 1909, Junior suggested that his father make a last ten-million-dollar contribution to the school then cut loose forever. “Few men have founded great institutions and have had the courage to wean them,” he said.49
A few weeks later, Gates weighed in with a letter that must rank as a seminal document in American philanthropy. It argued that a donor’s highest ideal should be to give birth to an institution that would then enjoy a life totally independent of
him. Gates noted that many schools—technology, agriculture, forestry, and others—were still needed to complete the university but that the money for them would not issue from other sources so long as Rockefeller was the university’s patron. During the previous seven years, he had given nearly $12 million, while the midwestern public had given only $931,000—a pittance. Rockefeller’s withdrawal was imperative on political grounds as well:
It will conclusively demonstrate the fact which the public has not been able to grasp—the fact of your entire disinterestedness. It will disclose beyond possibility of cavil that your motives in founding the institution are solely to bless and benefit your fellow men; that you have not been seeking through it to increase your personal power, to propagate your political views, to help your cause, or to glorify your name.
Noting that other rich men demanded control, Gates went on:
Mr. Carnegie is, I believe, a member of every Board which he creates, and of course, the managing member. Mr. Clark, who founded Clark University, undisguisedly and notoriously ran the institution until his death. Mr. Stanford died soon after designating his property for the Leland Stanford, Jr. University. His wife, however, took up the reins and openly conducted the University for many years, demanding openly the dismissal of professors uncongenial to her and supervising every detail of administration.
In closing, Gates urged Rockefeller to withdraw from the university and set his creation free.50
At first, Rockefeller did not reply or even acknowledge this letter, yet it set up far-reaching reverberations in his mind. Gates’s practical arguments must have counted heavily with him, but the idea of subordinating his ego to some larger institutional end would also have appealed to his religious sense of self-denial. He also believed that the “dead hand of fixed endowments” should not trap future generations with the outmoded agenda of the original donors. Perhaps for all these reasons, Rockefeller made a final $10 million payment to the University of Chicago in December 1910, bringing his total gifts to $35 million, or $540 million in 1996 dollars, then bid it farewell forever. In a valedictory to the board, he wrote, “It is far better that the University be supported and enlarged by the gifts of many than by those of a single donor. . . . I am acting on an early and permanent conviction that this great institution being the property of the people should be controlled, conducted and supported by the people.” 51 The withdrawal was not quite as total as Rockefeller implied. Between 1910 and 1932, the GEB and other Rockefeller philanthropies channeled $35 million to the university, supplemented by another $6 million from Junior. But Rockefeller, in a statesmanlike act, had established the concept of the patron as founder, not owner or overseer, of his creation. At their December 1910 meeting, the trustees of the university paid tribute to Rockefeller: “Mr. Rockefeller has never permitted the University to bear his name, and consented to be called its founder only at the urgent request of the Board of Trustees. He has never suggested the appointment or the removal of any professor. Whatever views may have been expressed by members of the faculty, he has neither indicated either assent or dissent.”52
In the early 1900s, there was a well-nigh universal perception that John D. gave generously to philanthropy to fumigate his fortune. As Governor Robert M. La Follette said in 1905, “I read yesterday that Rockefeller has been to prayer meeting again; tomorrow he will be giving to some college or university. He gives with two hands, but he robs with many. If he should live a thousand years he could not expiate the crime he has committed. . . . He is the greatest criminal of the age.” 53 Cartoonists stereotyped Rockefeller as a churchgoing hypocrite. One cartoon showed him as an angel with wings sprouting from his head, beneath the caption: “John the Baptist: High Finance Is Now Getting So High That Some People Expected to Get to Heaven from the Top of It.” 54
Were John D.’s donations as saintly as he claimed? Could he possibly have been insensible to the political impact of his good deeds? An internal memo written to George Rogers in 1906 sheds some light on this intriguing question. To assist Standard Oil in its political travails, Archbold asked Rockefeller in October 1906 to publish a list of the dozen or so colleges to which he had given significant endowments. Rockefeller was extremely reluctant to print such a list. “It is a thing we have never done before,” he advised Rogers, “and is very distasteful to me, and would not be considered for a moment, only with the idea that it might prove of help to us in the Standard Oil Company.” If a list was made up, he wanted a guarantee that it would be returned and destroyed, blotting out any trace of his complicity.55 This letter generally vindicates Rockefeller’s assertion that he did not exploit his philanthropy for selfish reasons, but it also shows that he occasionally bent his own rules. H. G. Wells was mostly right when he wrote in a 1934 book that “of all the base criticisms [Rockefeller’s] career has evoked, the charge that his magnificently intelligent endowments have been planned to buy off criticism or save his soul from the slow but sure vindictiveness of his Baptist God is surely the most absurd.” 56 Since his adolescence, charity had been interwoven with the fabric of his life.
Nevertheless, the press treated each Rockefeller donation as another bid to buy back his reputation. Never was this truer than during the tainted-money controversy that flared up in March 1905, when it was revealed that Rockefeller had given $100,000 to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a Congregational group in Boston, likely the largest gift the group had ever received. Coming at the close of the Tarbell series, this farsighted gift was bound to stir up a hornet’s nest of controversy.
With the creation of the GEB, Rockefeller had begun to funnel money to nondenominational groups and transcend religious giving altogether. Gates, who regarded sectarianism as “the curse of religion at home and abroad, a blight upon religion, whether viewed from an economic, intellectual, or spiritual standpoint,” eagerly encouraged this trend.57 As this lapsed minister jettisoned the Baptist Church, his Christianity sounded increasingly like high-minded social work. “My religion became . . . simply the service of humanity in the Spirit of Jesus. It is the religion of Jesus, of science, and of evolution alike.”58 In his papers, Gates left a startling memo, “The Spirit of True Religion,” which he apparently wrote to clarify his thoughts and in which he candidly stated, “There is no essential difference between religion and morality except that the one is more intense and passionate than the other.” 59 In 1903, he bluntly told one applicant that while Rockefeller was a Baptist, he would no longer establish Baptist schools “for the sole purpose of propagating those views which are peculiarly and distinctively Baptist.”60
The $100,000 gift of what came to be called tainted money was solicited by Dr. James L. Barton, who met one Sunday with Starr Murphy and Gates in the latter’s Montclair home. While Gates did not initiate the meeting, he did recommend to Rockefeller that he contribute the $100,000. In a letter to Rockefeller, Gates made a secular case for this missionary money, again showing that Rockefeller was capable of responding to explicitly worldly rationales for religious giving:
Quite apart from the question of persons converted, the mere commercial results of missionary effort to our own land is worth, I had almost said, a thousand-fold every year of what is spent on missions. Our export trade is growing by leaps and bounds. Such growth would have been utterly impossible but for the commercial conquest of foreign lands under the lead of missionary endeavor. What a boon to home industry and manufacture!61
Setting aside his customary silence, Rockefeller praised this letter profusely and agreed to send a $100,000 check to Boston a few days later.
So as not to be branded publicity-mongers, Rockefeller and Gates allowed beneficiaries to announce the receipt of gifts. Eager for publicity in this case— which would declare Rockefeller’s emancipation from sectarian giving—Gates pored over the newspapers, vainly awaiting some mention of the record Congregational gift. When he got the Boston board’s monthly publication, he expected to see banner headlines. Instead, the news
was tucked away in a two- or three-line item in which the secretary noted that he had received a $100,000 check from John D. Rockefeller “with surprise,” implying that the money was unsolicited.62 There was not a grudging syllable of thanks. The gift aroused a great ruckus as a chorus of Congregational ministers demanded that it be returned. Everybody had read in McClure’s about the nefarious methods by which this money had been procured.
The most visible critic was the Reverend Washington Gladden from Columbus, Ohio, a scourge of Rockefeller’s for many years. An articulate critic of the trusts, he was a leader of the social-gospel movement. Now, armed with facts supplied directly by Ida Tarbell herself, Gladden rose up in his Congregational church one Sunday morning to deliver a stinging tirade against the $100,000 gift. “The money proffered to our board of missions comes out of a colossal estate, whose foundations were laid in the most relentless rapacity known to modern commercial history,” he said.63 In this sermon, Gladden dubbed Rockefeller’s check “tainted money,” an expression taken up by the press and fixed permanently in the political lexicon. He filed a protest with the Congregational Church, pleading for return of the money.
Faced with this uproar, Gates waited for the Boston board to make a clean breast of the story and admit that the money had been solicited. Instead, they suppressed the truth, and Barton even reassured reporters that it had been unsought. When Gates read this, he threatened to expose the gift’s genesis, and only then did the Congregational board come clean. Both Gates and Rockefeller were disappointed that Gladden never made a widespread public retraction. As Rockefeller said, he “failed to do the manly thing and correct the false impressions which his writings had occasioned.” 64 Of course, Rockefeller’s self-satisfaction begged the larger question of whether people should accept money gained by what they deemed unscrupulous means.